Month: October 2014

Ah! I don’t even know what I’m going to do when fall ends because I’m so in love with all the season flavors!! As you guys know, I went cranberry picking a couple weekends ago and loaded up on the little tart treats so I’ve been having a lot of fun in the kitchen using them as accents to some of my favorite dishes. This particular dish is a sweeter quinoa salad, perfect fall crisp fall nights and great to take to work the next day for lunch! This cranberry quinoa salad is also the perfect healthy side dish to bring to your relatives’ on thanksgiving or christmas that’s delicious but also probably healthier than anything else on the table. 😉

Cranberry Quinoa Salad

1 cup of quinoa / a little less than 2 cups of water to boil it in

1 head of romanesco

1/2 apple sliced

1/2 cup of cranberries

1/4 cup slivered almonds

2 cups of baby kale

1/4 cup chopped white onion

1/4 cup chopped garlic

4 tbsp of coconut oil / macadamia nut oil or olive oil

1 cup of organic apple cider

2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice

spiced cider balsamic glaze: 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar / 2 tbsp olive oil / 1/4 cup reduced cider / 1 tbsp of dijon mustard / salt + pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees and lightly grease a baking sheet with some of your oil. Next, take a medium saucepan and fill it with your quinoa, water and  little salt. Keep the pan on medium heat and start stirring the quinoa when water starts boiling. Slice up your romanesco and place it on your baking sheet, drizzle with a little more oil and season however you like. Place that in the oven to roast for around 10-15 minutes while moving the pieces around so that they evenly roast.  In a separate small sauce pan, place your sliced apples, cranberries, apple cider and pumpkin pie spice. Keep it on a low heat and let it simmer as the fruit absorbs the cider and spices and the liquid reduces. Keep checking on the fruit and moving it around the pan for 10 minute or so until the liquid has reduced and saturated the fruits. In a frying pan on another burner, Place the remainder 2 tsp of your oil, your baby kale, onions and garlic and sauté till kale is wilted and onions are clear. When all liquid has evaporated from quinoa, it is done, take it off the burner and place into a medium bowl. Add in kale, roasted romanesco and fruit (with remaining cider drained and put to side for the glaze). In a separate small bowl whisk together the ingredients for the spiced cider balsamic glaze.  When combined, drizzle it over your quinoa salad and place into a serving dish. Sprinkle your almonds over the top to garnish and your done! I promise it’s a lot easier and faster than it seems from writing it all out in this recipe! It’s a great fall dish and I hope you share it with your family this season.

I am honored and thrilled to be a part of Well + Good’s Amazing Pumpkin Recipe round up! Who can ever get enough healthy pumpkin recipes?! Not me for sure, so it’s a delight to have my healthy vegan pumpkin balls in the mix with some other fabulous treats like pumpkin pie smoothies and my girl Jordan’s pumpkin chocolate chip bars! Click here and check out these 10 healthy pumpkin recipes so that you can celebrate halloween right this year! Althogugh, let’s be real, I’ll be making them well into the holidays! #Pumpkineverythingplease !

Don’t forget to tag me @gosweetandskinny in your delish pumpkin creations! I can’t wait to see and regram some of my faves! 🙂

I  can’t even begin to divulge all the knowledge that was dropped on me this weekend. Two ladies who have been incredibly influential and inspiring along my journey, Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert both in the same weekend. Mind blown. I’ve been so hyper and cracked out from all the excitement and inspiration flowing that I am most definitely a kid in a candy store right now despite being sugar free! haha At first my intention was to give you one big wrap up about the whole weekend but then I quickly realized when going through my notes that there was just too darn much to squeeze it all into one post, so you are getting THREE! This first one is my favorite highlights from my two power ladies, Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert, the second one will be all about Deepak Chopra and the last will focus on Rob Bell and Iyania Vanzant so you are in for triple the treats!

For starters, the Elizabeth Gilbert quote above, how many of you are still waiting on something to begin your quest?! Are you consciously or unconsciously waiting for someone to come “save” you, for something to happen and make it all work? Well guess what? That’s a pretty boring story to live! Get out of the passenger’s seat of your life and hop on over to the driver’s seat because YOU decide where the car’s going! in other words, you can make a U-turn right now if you think you’re going down the wrong path.

Oprah and Elizabeth both talked a lot about listening to LIFE because it’s talking to you.

“ When things are out of balance and going wrong, it’s the universe’s way of saying you’re going the wrong way, you need to switch direction.” – Oprah

It starts off with a little whisper, a gentle nudge, “this might not be right.” or “do I really want this?” and then keeps escalating the longer you don’t listen. All of a sudden that whisper graduates to a siren and you are in full on crisis mode because you had been ignoring all the signs and the universe was forced to whip out the big guns so that you had no choice but to listen! This is what often happens when we have a total breakdown in one area of our life. However, if we start paying attention to what “life”, “spirit” or our “inner guide” is trying to tell us, whatever you want to call that energy force, we can get on the right path long before it gets to be a real problem.

Elizabeth Gilbert talked a lot about the hero’s journey and going on our own hero’s journey or soul quest as women even though Joseph’s Campbell was all about a man. We are not the damsel in distress that the hero saves along his journey, WE ARE THE HERO, we do not need saving! The moment you decide to be your own hero as a woman, your whole life changes! “

The story of your life is far more interesting when you decide to be your own hero.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

So be BOLD, be BRAVE, write your own story and stand in your power. You can paint the picture that your life with look like. The time is now, we are guaranteed only this very moment, so what are we waiting for?

One of my favorite Buddha quotes, “The problem is, you think you have time.”

Get going now. You can start taking forward action right now, today. How can you start answering your calling? How can you make progress to the life you want? If you need help with this, don’t shy away from asking for guidance! Email me at gosweetandskinny@gmail.com  and request a breakthrough session, in only 30 minutes we can get you off in the direction of your dreams and towards the life you want!

oprahquote This next quote that really struck a powerful cord with me is all about the energy you put out into the world based on your intentions. This is a concept I’ve been working with a lot of my clients on recently.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENERGY WE BRING INTO EVERY ROOM WE WALK IN TO.

What kind of energy are you bringing? Ever had a friend meet up with you for lunch and you instantly know they’re going to give you bad news because of how it feels just being in their presence? Yup, you give off those vibes too when you are in a negative place about a situation.

Good news is that you can also bring positive, love energy to every situation and encounter you have! You can literally transform your life by simply minding the intentions you hold in any encounter. Before you go into a meeting, a date, a phone call with a family member, the gym, just take a minute and check your intention! Are you going in with love or fear? A good little reality check is to think “if everyone in this room could hear my thoughts, would this be a good experience?”

One of the lessons in A Course in Miracles is “No thoughts are private thoughts” and while it may not be true that everyone in that room can hear your exact thoughts, you best believe they can feel the energy your giving off because of them so choose your thoughts carefully!

I’m working on this with one of my clients right now that’s going on job interviews and I’m having her visualize her intended outcome for every meeting. And you know if you can’t fully believe that you’re going to get the job or whatever it may be, THAT’S OKAY! Just set a positive intention for the experience, ie. we have a great conversation and both leaving with a smile on our face or to share my love for my work and connect with him.

I also talk a lot about this concept with my clients who are dating, you don’t have to go in to every date with the intention of “he’s going to fall in love with me and we’re going to get married”, it doesn’t have to be that serious! Set the intention to have fun, to laugh, to brighten their day and they’ll feel that warmth and want more of it! Start today and think about all the little encounters in your day that you can transform simply by co-creating your experience with the energy of your intentions!

Comment below and let me know about how you were able to BEGIN and step into your hero shoes or how you were able to transform a situation with the energy of your intention! I’d love to hear from you! xoxo!

Ahh!! This quote from the Dalai Lama just hit home for me today! I confess that although I meditate everyday and professionally help people to find their inner peace on a daily basis, I still have a day here and there where someone’s behavior throws me for a loop. I even noticed this theme pop up with a lot of my clients in the past week. My clients were experiencing teachers, parents and romantic partners’ negative moods or hurtful behavior causing a tremendous detriment to their state of mind and the inner peace they’ve been working on creating.Too often we work on cultivating this beautiful inner garden, we bring the sunshine each day through our healthy habits and spiritual practice and then all of a sudden it feels like a force of nature, hurricane or tornado comes (in the form of someone’s else behavior towards us) and wreaks havoc on our beautiful patch of heaven, leaving us feeling empty and confused! Can you relate?

So for me when this happens, I instantly notice that I’ve moved out of my place of love and I’m not connecting with my higher self. As soon as I go to into that stressed, anxious, uncomfortable and unfamiliar place, it’s a wake up call. The longer I allow myself to stay in that place, the more exhausted, drained and achey I get, so I immediately take action. What does that look like?

Well first off: STOP. DROP. MEDITATE.

I have this simple meditation for letting go that you can try in a jiffy or even this one for finding PEACE now that I rely on a lot when I’m out and about and don’t have the luxury of my own space at home. I also love to do the kundalini meditation for irrationality (I teach it in my mindful eating + meditation class) video.

second, break out the ACIM!

A Course in Miracles says,” Everything is either love or a call for love.” So when someone is behaving cruel or negatively towards you and it’s definitely NOT love, it’s a desperate plea for love from them. When you take a minute to really see this person you’re dealing with from a total place of innocence, you can see how entangled in fear they are to act the way they are behaving. Yogi Bhajan said one of the sutras of the Aquarian age was,” understand through compassion or your misunderstand the times.” and it’s in moments of this frustration that I think back on his wise words and turn my head and my heart to compassion.

third — SURRENDER THAT SHIT!!

That’s right, give it up! Give it up to God, the universe, your dead pet, whoever you like to pray to / talk to / ask for advice. Say a little prayer and place the situation fully in their hands, ASK for the miracle, ASK to see things differently and then allow yourself to sit back and be guided. I like to say ” Dear God, please take – this situation – , I place it in your hands, please handle ALL the details, heal my mind of error and show me what you would have me do, Amen.” But you can phrase it however you like, just give it up, surrender the situation and stand in the willingness to shift your perception and experience a miracle.

and LASTLY..

know when to call in reinforcements.

This is where myself or your spiritual running buddy may need to intervene. Sometimes we can get so overwhelmed with emotion, stuck in the victim zone and held hostage by fear. This is where you call in the troops!! It’s a beautiful thing to be self-aware enough to know that you can not dig yourself out of the hole alone. My clients will send me an email in these situations or schedule an emergency call, and many of my girlfriends call and ask for “emergen-zen” sessions now. The “emergen-zen” session was actually born out of this situation with my girlfriends, a guy they were dating or a family member would put them in the hurt box and they would spiral into the fear zone and need an emergency appointment where we would talk about what was going down, I’d shed some light on their situation and help them flip their perspective and then guide them through a meditation and help them surrender it. They left feeling relieved, renewed and ready to get back to being their best selves and really encouraged me to start offering it publicly.

As a special bonus to those of you who resonated with the message in this quote and blog post this evening, I’m offering a SPECIAL DISCOUNT on my emergen-zen session for those of you who email me with “I READ THE BLOG!” in the subject line. 🙂

I will give you almost 50% off the price of a regular emergen-zen, so you will pay only $111 for the 90 minute intensive session! We’ll talk about what’s going on with you right now, help you gain clarity on the situation and I’ll personally guide you through a customized routine of different meditations allowing you to surrender the situation, let it go and create the space for a miracle. You’ll also leave with the recording of your personal guided meditations and a game plan on how to keep your zen going! If this sounds perfect for you or someone you know – feel free to email me at gosweetandskinny@gmail.com with “I READ THE BLOG!” in the subject line and we’ll get you scheduled ASAP!

Alrighty love bugs, I couldn’t hold out on you any longer. My newsletter subscribers got this vegan, gluten free, pumpkin spice donut recipe a couple weeks ago but I didn’t want anyone to miss out because it is SO good! For the latest, yummiest, exclusive recipes be sure to put your email in the giant box above and you’ll get a little love note from me each week with a mouth watering good-for-you recipe!

So amidst my mission to buy out all the pumpkin pie spice and organic pumpkin puree in New York City this fall, I have been almost exclusively making fall themed treats and these healthy, vegan, gluten free pumpkin spice donuts were the first of the bunch! They are baked, not fried and have a really nice, moist, cake-like texture. Give this recipe a whirl and let me know what fun toppings you decide to drizzle on these babies.

HEALTHY VEGAN PUMPKIN SPICE DONUTS
2 cups of trader joe’s whole grain baking mix ( you can use any baking /biscuit mix – for gluten free try Bob’s Red Mill’s!)
1 cup of organic pumpkin puree
3 tbsp of coconut oil
2 flaxs -‘eggs’ (2 tsp flaxseed meal + 6 tsp of water whisked)
3 tsps of pumpkin pie spice (or to your taste, I like a lot of spice!)
1 tsp of vanilla extract
—— dust top with coconut sugar + pumpkin pie spice ———
Super easy to make! Whip all ingredients in together in your mixer, place in a pastry bag (or a ziploc baggy that you cut a corner off! 😉 ) for easiest dispensing into your doughnut pan and bake in the oven on 375 degrees until golden on the edges. Plop out on cooling rack and sprinkle your dusting ingredients to your liking! Enjoy! Tag me on your photos when you make them and I’ll repost some of my favs! xo!

It’s the most magical time of the year! PUMPKIN SPICE season! Seriously, I am getting in the mood lately, and whipping a little organic pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves into just about anything I can get my little hands on. So it’s no surprise that this morning I was inspired to give my usual smoothie bowl a fall spin and it came out so delicious, it’s borderline dessert.

PUMPKIN SPICE SMOOTHIE BOWL
1 cup Anita’s Coconut Yogurt
1/2 cup organic pumpkin puree
2 tbsp almond butter
1 tsp maca powder
2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon/cloves/nutmeg)

top with: quinoa chia seed maple granola / extra chia seeds / crumbled pumpkin choc chip cookies

enjoy!! xo! Comment below and let me know what you’re favorite smoothie bowl mix-ins are!:)

There’s not much I love more than a taco salad and the vegan taco meat that I whipped up for my friends at Shape Magazine was the perfect delicious addition to help you get even more great fats and proteins in this vegan taco salad. It’s easy to throw together for lunch or dinner, a great source of protein and nutrients and c’mon who doesn’t love mexican!?

 
 

VEGAN TACO SALAD WITH CHILI LIME RANCH DRESSING

4 stalks of Romaine Lettuce chopped

½ cup of black beans ½ tomato chopped

½ white onion chopped

¼ cup of cilantro chopped

jalapeno chopped

1 avocado

¼ cup chickpeas

½ cup walnuts

1 tsp of flaxseed meal

2 tblsp of olive oil

½ tsp cumin

½ tsp coriander

½ tsp paprika

½ tsp chili

½ garlic powder

½ onion powder

salt/pepper to taste

In a food processor, combine chick peas, walnuts, flaxseed meal, olive oil, cumin, coriander, paprika, chili, garlic powder, onion powder and salt/pepper. Pulse till mixture is the consistency of chop meat. Combine chopped tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and a tsp of jalapeno in a small bowl and toss together. Drain and rinse the black beans. If you prefer, heat the black beans on the stove for a few minute by adding a little water to a sauce pan. After heated, drain again. Place chopped romaine at the bottom of your bowl. Add a scoop of black beans, two spoonfuls of tomato mixture, a scoop of your “meat” mixture and top with half of an avocado sliced.

Chili lime ranch dressing: Combine all dressing ingredients in a bowl, mix together and drizzle over salad

4 tbsp of tofu sour cream (or cashew sour cream – can make from scratch)

juice from a ¼ of a lime

pinch of onion powder

pinch of parsley

pinch of garlic powder

pinch of chili powder

½ tsp of plain unsweetened almond milk

I had quite the morning yesterday at my very first daybreaker experience here in NYC. For those of you who don’t know about daybreaker, it’s an early morning, completely sober dance party that’s sweeping the world right now. It kicks off at 6am with an hour of yoga and then proceeds to turn in to a full out dance fest from 7-9am. One of my guy friends had gone to one a couple weeks ago and had only amazing things to say so naturally, I had to check it out for myself. Needless to say, I am hooked! daybreaker1       I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much fun before 9am! Not only is the music amazing and the atmosphere great but the quality of people you are surrounded with is truly amazing. It’s quite a beautiful thing to look around a room and see yourself in the midst of totally blissed out New Yorkers who voluntarily woke even earlier than usual to dance their heart out before the start of their day. They serve espresso shots, water, and tea all morning to keep you hydrated and awake and even have fun “friends” come dance with you  — but I’ll leave something to your imagination.

At one point I asked my friend if she thought it was safe to put my bag down on a couch while we danced (this is NYC after all) but she instantly laughed,  “The kind of people who come out at 6am to dance aren’t people who steal, they are happy people who love their lives.”

AND ISN’T THAT JUST THE TRUTH!?

So if you’re curious about attending this amazing dance party, joining a group of people with amazingly high vibrations and having a good time before kicking off your day, check out there website here and get your email on the list.   Oh and, PS. Joseph Gordon Levitt was dancing with us yesterday and he has some killer moves, for real. 😉   daybreaker2